First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd
1 Spencer Court
140 – 142 Wandsworth High Street
London SW18 4JJ

© 2014 Shirley du Boulay

The right of Shirley du Boulay to be identified as the Author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988

ISBN 978-0-232-53074-2
eISBN 978-0-232-53199-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Extracts from ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘Burnt Norton’ taken from
Four Quartets © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by
permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Phototypeset by Kerrypress, Luton, Bedfordshire
Printed and bound by ScandBook AB

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedcation Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Early Murmurings – Experience

2. The Still Centre – Meditation and the Maharishi

3. A Cauldron of Spiritualities

4. A Ringside Seat in Television 1968–1978

5. Immersion in the Roman Catholic Church – John

6. The Liminal State – Pilgrimage

7. Nimmo – Shamanic Journeys

8. A Month in India – Discovering Interfaith

9. Double Belonging – ‘Many Religions, One God’

10. Biography – Another Sort of Immersion

11. God is One, but His Names are Many

12. After the Millennium

13. In My End is My Beginning

Index

Acknowledgements

This book has been through many versions and kind friends have read, commented and encouraged at every stage.

I would particularly like to thank Gina and Laidon Alexander, Mary Cattan, Giles Charrington, Julia Cousins, Kate Davis, Stephen Eeley, Judith Longman, Elizabeth North, Marianne Rankin, Donald Reeves, Cynthia Rickman, James Roose-Evans, Larissa Wakefield, Jane Wilde.

Especial thanks are due to Brendan Walsh, Julia Hamilton and John Wilkins for their insistence that I write in the first person, something I found hard at first but came to enjoy.

And to Helen Porter and all at Darton, Longman and Todd, especially David Moloney for his enthusiasm.

Introduction

I have long wanted to write about the extraordinary changes in western spirituality that have taken place over the last fifty or so years. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that so vast a subject would demand a doorstopper of a book that would take me twenty years to write and probably find few readers. Eventually I took the advice of kind friends, who persuaded me to approach the subject from a personal perspective, regarding myself as fairly typical of many of my contemporaries. So it has become, I suppose, a spiritual autobiography.

Over the last fifty years I have changed from being someone dutifully familiar with the Anglican Church of the mid-twentieth century, but knowing little about the nonconformist Churches, less about Roman Catholics and nothing at all about eastern religions, in those days dismissed as ‘mysterious’, to someone who has been involved with much of the spiritual revolution which has so changed our society. I am deeply grateful to live at this extraordinary and exciting time.

I have been privileged to see much of this spiritual revolution at close quarters, not only as a private individual, but in the 1960s and 1970s as a producer of religious programmes for BBC Television and, later, as author of several books, including biographies of figures such as Desmond Tutu and Bede Griffiths, whose spiritual experience is so in tune with our times. So in these pages I turn the spotlight on those aspects of contemporary spirituality that I have experienced myself, reflecting our developing multiculturalism and a new attitude to religion and belief, light years from the segregated pockets of faith that made up the spiritual scene in which I grew up.

To be caught up in the maelstrom of colourful but often conflicting influences leads, of course, to periods of confusion, guilt and lack of identity, but also to a joyous recognition that the people of the world have much in common despite our differences. That while we might belong to different religions, beneath those differences, underlying the institutions, there is a common spirituality. That we share more than we might have first thought and that the deeper we go into any religion, particularly its mystical side, the more we find that the Christian is not so different from the Muslim, or the Buddhist from the Hindu. Or even, one might in many cases say, from the unbeliever.

I also want to explore my conviction that, even in this age of atheism and non-belief, we are spiritual beings. I believe that the human race has an instinct for God, an urge that drives people to search for him.1 I think the same assumption is made by those who refer to the ‘God-shaped hole’, an idea first coined by Blaise Pascal when he said, ‘There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God.’ I believe that this instinct, often blind and unknowing, is as deeply rooted in our nature as is the instinct for self-preservation, the need for food and water, the urge to procreate. Not to feel that there must, or at least might be, a God and not to need, sometime in one’s life, to explore this possibility, is as unusual as to have no sexual drive or no appetite for food. We are, whether we like it or not, religious animals, who started to worship gods early in our existence and who were creating religions as we painted the walls of our caves. My sympathies are with people like Karen Armstrong, who writes that religion is not something ‘tacked on to the human condition, an optional extra imposed on people by unscrupulous priests. The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic.’2 We, the human race, are a God-seeking people. We are spiritual as well as physical.

So I trace my path from the early 1960s to the present time, my own spiritual milestones becoming springboards into the wider contemporary scene in which I have lived and worked. I want to clarify and understand – for myself as much as for anyone else – the confused wanderings that characterize the spiritual lives of so many of us, living as we do when the comfort of certainty is rarely part of our religious ambience. While there are those who simply dismiss callings from a mysterious world, call themselves atheists or agnostics and put the experience away in a drawer marked ‘not proven’, there are also many who go through real suffering as they obey the urge to follow a call they cannot resist. We may flee the hound of heaven, but he tends to catch up with us in the end.

My own background is fairly typical of my time. I was born into the England of the 1930s, unknowingly waiting for the Second World War to begin. Our lives were in the country, our play in muddy fields, our exercise climbing the chalky Berkshire downs. Food for our minds and hearts took the form of fairy tales, the classics, Greek and Roman gods and the correct use of the English language. Food for the spirit came, or so it was thought, from Anglican boarding schools and, in the holidays, regular attendance at the village church, which was also, of course, Anglican. For these occasions we wore tidy clothes and tried, usually unsuccessfully, to be on time. We sat diligently through the hymns and sermons, but they meant little to us. We – but perhaps here I should change to the first person, for I should not speak for my siblings on these matters – so yes, I assumed we were there to worship God, and indeed I used to sit near a painting of an old man that for years I assumed was God, but I saw nothing there of the mysterious being that tantalisingly appeared in other parts of my life and which I knew was there, somewhere, in some form.

So if church and religion did not claim much of my early life, God – whatever I meant by the word – infused every moment. This mysterious being may announce his presence in clear, unambiguous tones, in charismatic experience or even in actual words, but my experience was more a hazy certainty that he (or she, or it – I was not fussy about pronouns) was there, very close to me, surrounding me, filling me. I was not always conscious of this, as I went through the normal crises and sadnesses, joys and sorrows of childhood and adolescence, but looking back I know it was so.

Few people today live their spiritual journey entirely within one religious tradition and while I write from a broadly Christian perspective, other faiths, traditions and practices will be an integral part of the tapestry. So too will the expression that God finds through the arts, particularly, for me, through music.

I will not seek to prove the existence of God – others wiser than I have failed in that attempt and in any case it is not the purpose of this book. I will, however, argue that belief in God can be coloured by what the word means to you. And I may well end up by finding myself unable to use the word God at all.

I hope that this book may contribute to the growing awareness that, even as the sound of church bells becomes fainter, monastic vocations decrease and church rulings are increasingly questioned, we are essentially spiritual beings. And may we never forget that we have rich company and endless sustenance in the books and teachers, the sacred texts and the traditions, the arts and, if we are lucky, the friends, who surround us.

1

Early Murmurings – Experience

The first murmurings of the yearning for God often come early in life. I remember in that fog of trailing clouds being drawn almost consciously to ‘something’, though I didn’t know what to call it. It was sometimes near, sometimes far, mostly benevolent and always elusive; trying to grasp it was like trying to grasp a handful of smoke. Often after hearing music – I still remember a particularly wonderful concert by the pianist Denis Matthews who came to our school – I went to the woods and sat under a tree, lost in the wonder of it and knowing that such beauty must come from somewhere or someone, it had a source, though I had not the faintest idea what that source was or could be. I must have been an odious little prig, because I remember thinking that anyone who talked after hearing such music simply hadn’t appreciated it. The only appropriate response, I prudishly thought, was silence.

It was an Anglican school, so the first formal spiritual milestone of my youth was confirmation, and that stirred up a mental confusion that has not yet been entirely resolved. Three times during my teens I went through the process of being prepared for confirmation and twice, like a nervous horse, I refused at the fence. I felt I didn’t know enough, understand enough, believe enough – as if I ever could! The third time I went through with it, but I don’t remember it being a particularly profound experience. In fact I remember the white silk dress – I think it was called moiré – that I wore for the occasion better than the revelation of any spiritual truth. There was, however, a strange moment a few days later – one of those moments when you can remember exactly where you were. I was in my mother’s sitting room (we used to call it a drawing room, though I never quite knew why), which had two doors; I was standing just inside one of them, turned slightly towards the other. I remember a flash of feeling ‘Everything is perfect. There is no such thing as suffering. All is well and will always be well.’

A little later and another experience. I was walking through the woods and I saw a beech tree, its great trunk, its young yellow-green leaves unfurling in the spring sunshine. I knew that the beech tree and I were one and that we were both one with the whole universe. That we always had been and always would be. That experience, brief though it was, has reverberated through my life and has influenced every major decision I have made.

Despite its importance, perhaps because of its importance, I could not, for many years, talk about this and for a long time I didn’t even try to do so. But some fifty years later someone I deeply respect urged me to write about it, and – perhaps partly because he was talking to me in the role of spiritual director – I went home and wrote, before my normal inhibitions and reservations caught up with me.

I shall never forget that experience. But what was different, what changed at that moment? How was life after the Beech Tree experience different from life before? Before I was, in an unconscious sense, one, part of the universe, but unaware, unknowing. I was one in the sense that we are all one whether we know it or not. As a child I was lost in unhappiness for much of the time but for those precious moments, as clear now as 60 years ago, I was somehow in that oneness, in a place of endless joy, where unhappiness was only a word. I had heard the first call of a silent melody.

After this blinding, unforgettable experience, after knowing oneness, came a knowing separation, a lamenting loss, a continual search to know this oneness again. For I had seen being, been one with being. I had known what oneness – conscious, knowing oneness – was like. I was life and life was me and they were one, I had been one with being, in that place, in that moment, now – as we always are in truth, but most of the time we forget and do not see it.

The memory has lasted, it is indelible, but after so many years I wonder if the experience has lost some of its immediacy? So the search goes on, the longing to relive the experience, forever not seeing that it is here and it is now. The beech tree still diffuses its luminous beauty and I am in it, with it, part of it, united with it. If only this experience could be with me always. If only I could realise that, in truth, it is.

So – a glimpse into one childhood and the first stirrings of the longing for God. Those three ways to God – through music, through confirmation, which I suppose one can call ritual, and through nature. They were not unusual, but even when I was quite young I wondered why I was so drawn to this hazy, mysterious world that I later knew could be covered by the word mystical. I remember deciding that it was to do with my parents’ divorce.

We are all born into duality, into conflict, but when that conflict takes the form of separated, unhappy, angry parents, where does the child look for peace? I remember in those bemused, unhappy early years, feeling that if the two great archetypes of every child’s life, father and mother, were not only separated but disagreed over everything, most of all disagreed over me, then I had to find something in the middle of these warring parents, something that transcended them, that was unchanging, entirely reliable and true. So before I knew the word ‘religion’, before I had any understanding that I had been born into a family that regarded itself as Christian, I was aware of something. I suppose I called it God, but somehow what it was called did not seem very important. It was the ‘something’ I had heard in music, the happiness that surged after my confirmation and the inexpressible knowledge of oneness that had been waiting for me in the woods for so long, and that I experienced that spring morning. I didn’t know then that I was to spend my life searching to relive that experience; that I was to long for it to infuse my life, to be my life, always.

Experience has a special place in spirituality, for not only is experience the starting point of all good theology, but as it often takes the form of mystical experience it can reach the heart of things in a way acquired knowledge cannot. It is true. It cannot be denied. After my life was graced by that single, blessed beech tree I felt I could understand why martyrs went to their deaths rather than deny the truth they had seen in all its blazing glory. Experience is the most blessed friend to spiritual understanding and an indicator that God is at work, though it is an indicator that needs to be tried, tested, followed up with patient practice, for it does not stand on its own any more than one night’s passion makes a marriage. And experience can change lives.

We are, naturally enough, most influenced by our own experiences; nevertheless we can also be moved, even changed, by the experiences of others. We can find reassurance in them. Three particularly have touched me deeply. The first one happened nearly seven hundred and fifty years ago.

It was December 6th, 1273, when a middle-aged Italian friar, celebrating Mass, had a mystical experience so profound that he stopped working on the great book that was his life’s work and never wrote another word. ‘I cannot go on,’ he said. ‘All that I have written seems like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.’ Three months later he died. The friar was St Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas, the Dominican widely considered to be the Christian Church’s greatest theologian, had let the Summa Theologica, a compilation of all of the main theological teachings of the time, probably the most important work of Catholic theology, studied by theologians and philosophers of all denominations, go unfinished in the face of experience. What a tribute to the value of experience! What a man to act on it! That a theologian as great as St Thomas Aquinas should be able to dismiss his life’s work as ‘so much straw’ compared to the true, direct, experience put theology and theologians in a new light for me.

Some seven hundred years later a young man of German origin woke one morning with the feeling of dread that had been his constant companion for his whole life. He could see no point in living, all he wanted was annihilation. ‘I cannot live with myself any longer,’ he thought.

‘Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. ‘Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the “I” and the “self” that “I cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.”’

He was then drawn into what he calls ‘a vortex of energy’ and felt he was being sucked into a void, but alongside the terrible fear he seemed to hear the words ‘resist nothing’. The young man was Eckhart Tolle, who went on to live a life in a state of peace that has never left him and who has written several books that are having a profound influence on countless readers in the twenty-first century.

Two people, centuries apart, whose lives have been changed by profound experiences. One at the end of his life, leading him to forsake his written work but allowing him to die in peace; the other given life when all seemed lost and using that life most productively. Aquinas changed the face of theology for future generations, yet his experience was, for him, supreme. Eckhart Tolle’s gives hope to people in the uttermost despair.

My third example, the one who speaks most directly to me, is from Father Bede Griffiths, the English Benedictine monk who died in 1993. I am drawn to him partly because his first great experience could be classed in the same family of experiences as my own, nature mysticism, but also because he was able to write about it most movingly. I have always felt that, whether he intended to or not, he was writing for people like me, for so long unable to articulate a life-changing experience and grateful for the reassurance provided by his words.

The year was 1923 and it happened when he was a seventeen year-old schoolboy, walking in the school playing fields. He had often walked this way before; he had seen other beautiful evenings; he had often heard the birds singing with that full-throated ease which proceeds the dying of the day. But this was different:

The effect of this experience on his life can hardly be overestimated. From this moment his life was firmly placed in pursuit of the God who had touched him through nature and who he was to seek for the rest of his long life. The experience inspired the lifetime’s search of this extraordinary man: he came to regard it as one of the most decisive events of his 86 years on earth. For not only were his senses awakened, but he experienced an overwhelming emotion, a glimpse of the unfathomable mystery that lies behind creation. He began to rise before dawn to hear the birds singing, to stay up late to watch the stars, to spend his free time walking in the country. This sense of awe in the presence of nature began to take the place of the religion in which he had been brought up and which came to seem empty and meaningless in comparison; he longed for these sacramental moments, always seeking a reality beyond the mind. Consciously or unconsciously everything in his life was directed to that end.

And there’s the rub: one of the dangers of being blessed with these experiences is that one cannot rest content in what one has received – one wants more. But it seldom happens like that. One of the most moving aspects to the life of Bede Griffiths was that he had to wait for 63 years before he had another experience with that sort of power, and always he was longing for it, searching for it. However, his first experience was a beginning, an opening, an encouragement to start the long journey. It was the first tugging of what he later called ‘The Golden String’ that was to dominate his life.

And so was mine. And as I write this I realise that my moment of oneness with my beech tree was 63 years ago.

There are no rules about mystical experience, who it chooses to grace, what form it takes or where it leads. There is no logic as to when, or even if, it happens. Some of us strive for years, yet true, profound experience eludes us. It is like coaxing a gazelle to feed out of one’s hand – the harder we try, the shyer the creature becomes. Yet to others it comes unbidden and unexpected, in the shower, walking past a London post box, on the road to Damascus. Spiritual experience is a blessing, a random, wilful gift with its own mind about when and to whom to appear: an unexpected gift, appearing in its own time. It is a two-way joy - the longing for God to find a home, the joy of the seeker, reaching, if only for a few seconds, the peace, the security, the love, the oneness, for which we yearn.

The fruits of experience do not stop with the one who has received. St Seraphim of Sarov said, ‘Acquire the spirit of peace and a thousand souls around you shall be saved,’ and so it is that one person’s experience can shed light for others. I have never been a great devotee of the saints – a Presbyterian/Anglican upbringing does not encourage such things - but I am beginning to see how wrong I am. It is their direct contact with the source of all being that gives the saints honoured and special places in the history of humankind. The most famous example of this is the Buddha, whose story has inspired millions of lives.

He was born as Prince Siddharta Gautama 2,500 years ago in the Himalayas. For some years he fulfilled expectations as the son of a king, living a life of worldly pleasure, marrying a princess and fathering a son. Always, however, he was haunted by a sense of the impermanence of everything in this world and unable to delight in it. It was as if something were constantly pulling at him, but remaining determinedly elusive.

When he was 29 years old, he made an astonishing resolve – he determined to find a way to end the suffering in the world. He left home and for six years he led the life of a mendicant, studying under various teachers and following ascetic practices until he was so weak he nearly died of starvation. Still he had not found the answer to his question, still he had not learnt the ultimate nature of things, still he did not know the final goal of existence; most of all he had not reached the enlightenment he sought. Eventually he came to a place now known as Bodhgaya and sat down under a Bodhi Tree there, determined not to leave until he had attained his goal.

After a long and intense struggle and many weeks of meditation he reached his goal. His experience was overwhelming and true. He thought: ‘This is the authentic Way on which in the past so many great seers, who also knew all higher and all lower things, have travelled on to ultimate and real truth. And now I have obtained it!’

And others could see it in him. A first-century biography records that a mendicant saw him and said:

So deep was his enlightenment that, as St Seraphim promised, the whole world was affected.

But for him this was only the beginning. ‘Having myself crossed the ocean of suffering, I must help others to cross it. Freed myself, I must set others free. This is the vow which I made in the past when I saw all that lives in distress.’4

So the experience of Prince Siddharta led to him becoming the founder of teachings that, in the twenty first century, are followed by some 350 million people; his experience was to lead to the enrichment of generations of sentient beings.

The archetypal figures of most of the great religions were inspired by an experience whose truth they could not deny. Moses heard the voice of God calling from the midst of a bush that was burning but was not consumed. The voice told him to take off his shoes, for the place where he was standing was holy ground. When Moses asked for the speaker’s name the voice said, ‘I AM THAT I AM’, one of the most remarkable statements in the history of our relationship to God. ‘I AM’ then commanded Moses to lead the Israelites to the land flowing with milk and honey, to the Promised Land.

I wonder if there would be any atheists left, I wonder if the word atheism would have a meaning, if we used the term the Old Testament God used of himself? Who can deny ‘I AM THAT I AM’? Who can deny the voice of BEING itself?

Many of the great figures in religious history were in touch with this blazing force, a power which finds expression in the great I AMs of the Christian Bible, the ancient Sanskrit mantra ‘SO HAM’, also meaning ‘I am that I am’, the Jewish ‘YAHWEH’, believed to mean ‘he who causes to be’ or ‘he creates’ and the single word OM or AUM, meaning without a beginning or an end, embracing all that exists and symbolizing the most profound concepts of Hindu belief.

Yet experience comes in all shapes and sizes. We should never cease to be grateful for the small experiences which pattern and illuminate our lives – they may not save a thousand but experience can be shared, passed on. The first biography I wrote was about Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement. Her experience of dying and death has helped countless people cope with their own tragedies. I remember her ringing me after the death of my husband. In a fit of despair I asked her (the futility of the question eluded me), ‘How do I cope?’ She was kind and wise as always. ‘Plod on,’ she said, ‘plod on.’ Such simple words, but the fruit of so much experience. Plod on – the words struck me with such force that over twenty years later I still remember the relief I felt. Plod on – yes that was all I could do, so I might as well do it whole-heartedly. It helped.

I remember a prayer at school. ‘Help us to take delight in simple things.’ Oh what wisdom in that short phrase. We do not have to live continually at Force 10 – we would soon be burnt out if we did. In his remarkable book Holiness5 Donald Nicholl tells of Rabi’a, a Muslim mystic who lived over a thousand years ago. One of her followers asked her advice in achieving the virtue of patience, a question which received a two-word answer: ‘Stop complaining.’ Not only the questioner, but all the others present, expecting elevated guidance, felt let down, but soon, as they put her words into practice and remembered the words ‘Stop complaining’, they saw the wisdom of her advice.

Some experiences, like, for me, the beech tree, are indelible, never-to-be-forgotten. Others are small, apparently insignificant, not necessarily happy and may not appear to have led to anything, but they are jewels that we treasure, the bank on which we draw, whether consciously of unconsciously. I remember as a child spending hours of the summer sitting in the bows of our small sailing boat. The rest of the family were gathered round the helm, laughing and telling each other jokes, while I would watch the water pass, dragging a finger in the sea, my mind miles away. I cannot claim any great experience, but somehow those hours of nothingness, emptiness, in the midst of laughter in which, for no particular reason, I did not join, have been a source of nourishment, though I cannot tell how.

For many people spiritual experience is the liquor of youth, perhaps returning to grace old age. The middle years tend to be devoted to more prosaic matters like learning a trade and earning a living, to human relationships and sexual joys and sorrows, establishing a home, having a family – in short to the whole huge and exciting world of the phenomenal. Certainly this was true for me. For many years the world took over and spiritual experience hid from me, overlaid, in a sense by my own choice, in experiences of a rather different nature. This is not to say that these more worldly experiences did not have a spiritual component – relationships could hardly exist without a spiritual element, it sings in interests such as gardening, walking and sailing, it colours unexpected moments, murmuring a discreet reminder. But for several years the longing for God was fallow, at rest, biding its time. Or if it was trying to tell me anything, I managed not to hear it.

Experiences leave their mark, as surely as the mark left by spilling a bottle of dye on the carpet never quite disappears, but for some time these early experiences were overlaid by life as a music student in the London of the 1950s: spiritual experience took second place to curiosity about every other sort of experience.

I have never kept a journal regularly but for some reason I have kept most of my engagement dairies – as if to hang on to memories of events, if nothing else. And I am glad I did, for looking through my dairies of the time I am amazed at what fun I had. The fifties are now regarded as colourless, boring times for young people. There are those who say that we were thinking only of recovering from the Second World War, and remind us that the news bulletins were concerned with the Korean War, the Cold War and the Suez crisis. It was a time, they say, when we barely understood the significance of hearing at regular intervals of another African country being freed from colonial rule and greeted the discovery of DNA with dutiful respect rather than an understanding of its implications.

Not long ago I was moaning about today’s world to a highly intelligent young nephew and was silenced by his polite response: ‘Well, it’s the only world I know, and I love it.’ In the 1950s I would have felt the same. Certainly it was a time of social conservatism, materialism and affluence, but I, like most of my contemporaries, only took a passing interest in such matters and any interest I took would have taken the form of idealistic disapproval. Simply being alive was rich with excitement. Arriving in London to start my three years at the Royal College of Music I still remember going out that first evening to see the lights at Piccadilly Circus; to those of us fresh up from the country, only a few years from war time blackouts, they were indeed exotic.

If your interests lay, as mine did at the time, in the arts and in culture, there was so much to discover. The Festival of Britain opened in 1951 and thousands of us flocked to the Royal Festival Hall, past the statues of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, where we heard conductors like Otto Klemperer, violinists like Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh, singers like Lisa della Casa, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and the incomparable lieder singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

I remember being one of a group of music students invited to play there to test the acoustics – they were so cool and dead that playing in a small orchestra – I played the viola – you could only hear yourself. I seem to remember that our experience led to reflective chair seats being put in place to warm the sound.

Outside London the Aldeburgh Festival had already started and one year I was lucky enough to be a member of a house party of professional musicians playing there when Benjamin Britten dropped in for breakfast. Back in London I sang in the Bach Choir and went to Madrigal weekend parties, singing the music of sixteenth-century musicians like Gibbon and Byrd with joy. Occasionally I acted as a stringer for The Times, writing music criticism – something I did not do for long, partly as I was so ashamed that I should dare to write about, and even criticise, my betters.

There was Glyndebourne, the Bolshoi Ballet and the Royal Court Theatre. Lucky Jim was published; Look Back in Anger introduced us to kitchen-sink drama and changed attitudes throughout the country, particularly among those unwillingly tied to domesticity. Pinter’s The Birthday Party divided the critics, the Pop Art Movement began, the first Caribbean style Carnival laid the foundations for the annual Notting Hill Carnival and the slowly emerging youth culture saw the Beatniks began to protest against the social norms, expressing the first stirrings of the counter-cultural and hippie movements. Mary Quant pioneered the ‘Chelsea Look’, the first boutique opened in Carnaby Street, Elvis Presley rocked his way to a fame that still endures and Harry Belafonte reigned as the ‘King of Calypso.’

The fifties - dull? Not to a student or to someone just starting work at the BBC.

Spiritually it was a different matter. I was not part of any particular group, but I remember the Church of England in the 1950s as confident, ‘established’ in every sense, and with respectable congregations. I have since heard that some people believe that the seeds of today’s decline in Churchgoing were sown in those complacent years, when there was no lay involvement and everything centred on the clergy. Certainly my memory is of going to church only occasionally and only out of a sense of duty – and hardly daring to admit, even to myself, how bored I was by the experience.

In the Fifties where there was any spiritual life it tended to be at the evangelical end of the scale, with Billy Graham pulling in the crowds at vast crusades – in 1954 his meetings at the Harringay Arena topped 2 million. I heard him once at the Royal Albert Hall and watched goggle-eyed as people went up to the front of the hall to publicly declare Jesus Christ as their personal saviour. My inhibitions would have kept me firmly seated even had I been tempted to such a declaration, which I was not. I also remember going to something called LIFCU, the London Interfaculty Christian Union, and finding that so not to my taste that I did not even stay to the end. Again the emphasis was on standing up and making a public declaration and again I realised this was not my scene, however genuine those who made these statements.

Only one aspect of religion tempted me, but with my middleclass Anglican upbringing and Presbyterian mother that was not something I could, at the time, readily admit to. I used to wander sometimes into a church in west London not far from the Royal College of Music. At the time I thought it was a Roman Catholic Church, so I would creep in, wrapped in guilt, when there was no service, smelling the lingering incense in the air and wondering just what was so different, what was so wrong, about being a Roman Catholic. At the time I only knew one Roman Catholic – a cheerful, generous soul – and almost nothing about the faith. But two things drew me – the fact that T.S.Eliot worshipped here, indeed for 25 years he was Churchwarden, and that Catholics were very sure they were right. Already a lover of Eliot and unimpressed by Anglican vague broadmindedness, I found both very attractive. (It was some years before I realised that this church, St Stephen’s, was not in fact Roman Catholic, but High Anglican, albeit as High Anglican as you could be without crossing to Rome.)

So my memory of the fifties was of a full and exciting life in a spiritual vacuum, pierced occasionally by a sweet smell of incense and a guilty longing that I did not understand or even bother to study. However, the next stage in my spiritual explorations was not becoming a Roman Catholic, but something even further from my conventional Anglican background.

2

The Still Centre – Meditation and the Maharishi

‘My mission in the world is spiritual regeneration.’ Those were the first words of a talk given by an Indian guru in London in April 1960. My great friend Jane Davies, at the time teaching the flute at the Guildhall School of Music, had taken me; she had already started doing his system of meditation and was so enthusiastic about it that she was convinced I should hear about it. I went along willingly enough, but with no great expectations.

She was right – I was thrilled by this strange man, sitting cross-legged surrounded by flowers and disciples and known as the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I was not in the least put off by his long straggly hair and his high-pitched laugh. In fact as I felt the happiness and conviction coming from him and as I heard about his method of meditation, something stirred; I was reminded, I think, of those experiences of over a decade ago; that pulsing inner life that had been submerged in discovering worlds of a different sort.

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